


House Across The Street

by FrannieHopkirk



Category: Short Stories - Saki
Genre: Poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-14
Updated: 2020-08-14
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:42:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25887529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrannieHopkirk/pseuds/FrannieHopkirk
Kudos: 3





	House Across The Street

I could see their house from my house, directly opposite. I would sit and stare at it as though I were at the cinema waiting for the music to start. My interest started with the house – the bricks and mortar crucible where people unfurl their dreams. 

They were already living there when my daughter and I moved into our house. I thought how beautiful they were, how right they seemed in their charming old house, its chimney pot and a view over the town. The wife, very pretty, long legged, graceful, blonde; the husband good looking, nuggetty, came and went in a truck indicating that he was a ‘tradedy’. I had not noticed that the wife was pregnant.

There was something exotic and silent about her. I had never heard her speak and I observed a restraint, something refined, not warm. Later I felt there may have been a problem in the relationship – the restraint I mean, a lack of warmth perhaps. What I watched was subtle, like a French Noir film, one of those films that end up not telling you the secret, if there was one – leaving you to figure-out the ending.

Their lives were no more transparent than mine, I did not exist to them. At the same time they had become somewhat of an obsession to me. I did not seek engagement, to drink coffee, chat or be a friendly neighbour. As an outsider I prefer to leave people alone and hope they do me the same favour. I was non- existent to them and wanted it that way. I could not, nor would I, invade their world. Their aura of untouchability appeared as a ‘model’ caught in the cob-web of my imagination

What I knew about the family across the street came to me accidently, like an unwritten script I was writing. My knowledge of them had been by simply looking at their comings and goings. As I am not a participant in village life people know very little about me. Anonymity is what I seek. Music, writing and dreaming are where my pleasures lie.

Was the silence that I could ‘hear’ from my house, an echo of their happiness or was it just silence? The visible bounty of their lives rolled out before me, the house, the birth of their baby. The order of their existence floated toward me in a nourishing enchantment. I didn’t want what they had. I participated in my way – part imagination part platonic interest.

Beauty is happiness made manifest, it is not a ‘front’, a pretence, something secret or withheld, not something to hide behind. Private but palpable – they, whose names I was never to know, appeared to have both, the beauty and the happiness. Yet the dream would ship wreck. It was possibly already tipping. 

What changed ? Love is a sound, a sound of communication, of music, of laughter, drinking, talking. There was very little sound, even from the child when he appeared. The dogs alone conveyed human presence. 

Something. Something beneath the surface had happened. A situation, a life that represented natural order had been ever so quietly shattered. Like a negative force emerging from the depths, the ambience had altered.

I considered the elemental nature of happiness, its complexity. Someone once said: “things or places can only change by staying the same”. I don’t even know what those strange words mean. I rolled the Chinese-like expression around my tongue finally it made sense - it related to the family across the street. Something had changed but everything appeared the same. The happy couple had begun their adventure not considering that already, in the midst of the goodness, not yet seen, crouched the seeds of its destruction.

How necessary and yet how ignored available beauty and love are, so often lost and abused by neglect. I was viewing a life, theirs, as one would ponder an old transparency, a faded piece of film, still livid with life, images of their life, sweet and untouchable.

Quite soon after we had moved into our own house I had became aware of them from my studio window where I work. Glimpses of them became a pleasure and interest to me. They seemed a hologram of the perfect couple. Whilst indulging my interest in myriad forms of humanity, I had become aware of the disconnect between the family across the street, and me. In village culture this is unusual. It was oddly evident that they literally never looked in our direction. As the development of our house and garden took shape in front of their eyes, we appeared totally invisible to them. This was fascinating and a bit spooky. It increased the sense that I was the audience in a cinema, silently looking at a story told in celluloid.

This is how it went: They bought their house, they made love then there was a baby, a tiny papoose traded between them as they came and went. Later I learnt what was in the papoose, it was a boy, named George. This intelligence manifestly increased my interest. I did not know the parents name, yet I now knew the their baby was called George – to me a name for the world, a name ringing with significance.

Apart from the normal parental activity involving George I began to sense a absence of something. The pleasant, understated mood, the restraint, seemed to be slowly morphing into something else.

Meanwhile George became a ‘person’ in a push- chair, taken for strolls. I was finally able to get a proper look at him. He was the most beautiful little boy imaginable. I was in love. I gazed hoping for glimpses, strained my ears for voices. 

Then he started walking. The toddler thing had begun. I watched him scrambling up the steps to the front door, flexing his strong little body with increasing confidence. They had bought a red plastic pedal car for him to drive backwards and forwards in front of the house, behind the hedge. There were two dogs whose bounding enthusiasm provided the only loud sounds as the family came and went. After about a year I noticed the change: the husband and his truck seemed no longer in evidence. The worst had happened. They had “split up”. 

The words dripped like poison - banal, sad little words, so weighted with loss, chaos, tears, unexplainable pain, disruption to normal existence had suddenly happened to a marriage that appeared in a context beyond the ravages of divorce. To me, the observer, what was much worse - was how this catastrophe would impact on their child.

Months passed. A deep, welling irrational sadness connected them to me. This was getting ridiculous, I was concerned about the lives of total strangers. I worried about a baby growing up without his father sitting at the table with him and his mother. Why did I care about that? How had I become so emotionally involved? Watching people I didn’t know had an element of perversion to it. If my interest was just academic why was I getting so upset, everything I had observed of this family was dissolving in front of my eyes, like a silent film dropped in a pond.

Had their life, the entire theatre of their presence in the house across the street, the dogs and the chimney pot, the comings and goings, the baby, been a lie? In a material, venal sense the construct I was secretly engaged in, had existed in MY imagination only? Had I mentally created these people to fulfil something lacking in my own life?

Of course it had not been a lie. It was a life. What had begun with finding the house, making love with branches of a great tree stroking the roof. Their pleasures in each other, the baby - another pulse beating among them. This was the very definition of truth, natural, human, civilized, truth. The beautiful life in the small town of their intimacy. Happiness was as visible as a sunset.

I watched her paint the pergola at the front gate, ready to support a climbing pink rose. This appeared as happiness in story form, flawlessly conceived and designed. A untouchability surrounded them. I saw this reflected in the fact that never once did they look in my direction. Except for one occasion when George waved to me. Now I know I am crazy – one tiny wave.

And then, out of nowhere, a bolt from hell: “They have split up”. The story, their story, as small as leaves in a tea-cup, as delicate as song, had fallen to earth. 

The absurdity of the words went into my skull like a hammer. What brand of cataclysm could penetrate, unbalance the even tenor of what had appeared inviolate. As with any human relationship destructive energies, always available, s But why them?

This had happened to a marriage outwardly appearing beyond the ravages of divorce. To me, it loomed as tragedy. The worst of this had not just happened to them, it had happened to George. His life would be forever altered. 

Had the growing quiet, the restraint, been a disguise for something beyond the world outside. The intimacies of any marriage are secret. In a perverse way the doors had been closed on me. The spectacle of a marriage complete with old house and two dogs and a perfect baby was gone. I knew nothing, and yet I was swept into the current of their pain. There is no beginning or end to these stories. A private season had played out in front of me. 

The husband put his things in the truck and left in a scowl of diesel fumes. He evidently part- owned the house implying a legitimate demand for his half of the value of what they had bought together. I pondered that something new had presented for him, investment, something or someone else. The wife moved to another residence in another part of town. I miss them. I miss George. 

The For Sale sign was taken down but the house has remained empty, as though waiting for their return. It stares back at me with its kindly face.

The beautiful golden girl drove away with George, his small head just visible in his car-seat. They were gone. I have not seen or heard of them since. This was not a lie – it was a life. 

The house was always quiet, now it was lifeless. The pink roses on the pergola have begun to flower. 

They left the gate open. Months later, it is still open. Is this the metaphor, the symbol for the idea that nothing ends or endlessnessism, the symbolic no-beginning-no-end of life, of families, of relationships, of love?

The gate is still ajar. The house is still empty.


End file.
